Downtown San Diego has never been as cold as it was a century ago. I mean this literally.

So literally that if Gabriel Garcia Marquez were to publish a novel about San Diego today, he might call it “100 Years of Solid, Dude.”

It’s been exactly a century since the two coldest days in the history of our city of endless summers, and they happened to fall back to back. Temperatures haven’t dipped that low since.

The occasion is worth noting since so many of us in San Diego love talking about the weather, especially when it’s 65 or 70 and sunny, as it almost always is.

A quick note to readers in northern climes: I try not to gloat, but I couldn’t resist. Also, weather here is more complex than you think.

The National Weather Service logged the mercury in its highly historic thermometer at a lowly 25 degrees Fahrenheit at 6:15 a.m. on Jan. 7, 1913. In the history of recorded weather, San Diego’s observation station has dipped below 30 degrees only three times: first on Jan. 6, 1913, to 28 degrees, and most recently on Jan. 4, 1949, when it was 29.

“Whoa,” you might say before grabbing your surfboard this morning.

About that lowest temperature on record, the weather agency’s website says this: “It was a killing freeze all over San Diego County and many crops and fruit were lost. Water pipes were frozen, trolley lines were disrupted and fishing nets were made unusable. There was ice skating in a San Diego fountain on ice 0.75 inch thick.”

Can you imagine?

I can’t, and I lived in Minnesota, Massachusetts and New Hampshire before moving to San Diego in 1999. I’d forgotten about the necessity of gloves until I found myself without them in Big Bear two weeks ago. And I’m not ashamed to say I wore a winter hat on my way to work Monday; it bore the Red Sox “B,” but it wouldn’t have kept the cold out in Boston.

What I mean is that cold is relative, especially to San Diegans with family in New England or the Upper Midwest. San Diegans like meteorologist Mark Moede, who worked in Green Bay, Wis., until moving here in 1995.

Moede lives in Carmel Mountain Ranch now. Yes, he’s still a Packers fan and no, he doesn’t have the easiest job in the world.

I asked if San Diego meteorology was easy peasy, as my 5-year-old who now prefers snow vacations to Mexican ones would say. Turns out Moede thought so at first.

“‘Oh, I can enjoy the warm weather, I can forecast the weather in southern California. I’ll have extra time for doing research,’” he remembered thinking. “And then I got here, and that isn’t the case at all.”

Our county’s weather patterns vary extremely across four climate zones — coastal, mountain, valley and desert, said Moede, which is pronounced like made in the shade without the silent “e.”